(This is a rewrite of three different pieces on Spicer. Read him.-tb)
Ron Silliman commemorated the anniversary of September 11 on his blog with a gruesome photograph of Ground Zero, over which he superimposed two poems by Jack Spicer. The collage understandably provoked a minor tempest among readers who felt that we had endured enough fetishism of the attacks, and that Spicer himself might not have approved of such a use of his work. I found the combination both compelling and appropriate. Spicer equated God with a kind of Big Radio, imagining poetic inspiration as a series of transmissions from distant places, carrying the voices of dead poets whose metaphors might, in turn, become apt descriptions of contemporary circumstances.
The question raised by Silliman’s collage is whether a poem belongs to its author’s original intentions or to the historical circumstances in which subsequent readers encounter it. By the time the hidden essence or secret nuance of a poem catches up with a culture’s experience, the poet’s original intent, while interesting, is no longer necessarily decisive. What matters is how the words make our lives comprehensible, even if only on a visceral level. One could argue that the suggestive correspondences between older poems and contemporary events amount to little more than coincidental irony. Yet there comes a saturation point at which lines originally intended to suggest something hushed, elusive, and only vaguely graspable become precisely the phrases we need to articulate what otherwise escapes us. Tragedies and unexpected windfalls alike can intervene in our lives, leaving us searching for language adequate to the experience. Sometimes a poem written for an entirely different occasion supplies the words we cannot find for ourselves.
The poet eventually loses control of what his work is supposed to mean as history adds new associations to its syntactical skin. Spicer, I suspect, might well have objected to the use of his poems in Silliman’s collage. Nevertheless, there is a savage bluntness in the ways poets attempt to extract greater resonance from the obscenity of violence, and that bluntness speaks powerfully to what we remember on September 11. What Spicer intended becomes, in this instance, a secondary concern. Today was the day everything changed, as the overused phrase goes, and the event forced people to examine who they were, who they claimed to be, and why those distinctions mattered in the face of such incomprehensible destruction. Spicer, no less than anyone else, would likely have considered the implications at length. There is something compelling about the notion that words spoken in one context can be repeated against seemingly opposing backgrounds, acquiring meanings their speakers could never have anticipated. The voices transmitted through the air, through the radio of memory, are activated by extraordinary events that transform our ordinary lives, which are never as static as we might imagine. Silliman’s collage is an inspired combination of histories, demonstrating that the past and the present are no longer mutually exclusive.
This capacity for unexpected resonance is one of the reasons Jack Spicer deserves a more prominent place in the American poetic canon. I am just finishing what may be the must-read poetry volume of the year, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poems of Jack Spicer, edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian and published by Wesleyan University Press. The collection has temporarily overcome my prejudice against poems about poetry and poets. Spicer’s third-rail wit, his willingness to interrogate the premises of his own art, has a way of knocking the reader off balance.
A singular figure who fit comfortably neither among the Beats nor in the New York School or the San Francisco Renaissance, Spicer wrote at the margins of the principal debates about what poetry was and ought to be. Yet his counterarguments, asides, and declarations often possess a self-contained clarity and vision that surpass those of many writers whose work he regarded with suspicion. He was an outsider even within the literary communities in which he moved, and his poems reflect a persistent distrust of the conventions through which poets establish their reputations and defend their artistic territory.
Interrogating received notions was Spicer’s abiding concern. The practice of making literary practice the unifying metaphor for an entire body of work can seal poetry off from the very readership that might benefit from its skewed perspective. Unlocking a door only to discover another locked door, or a brick wall, ceases to be amusing when one begins reading poems for something other than the status they confer upon their authors. Spicer, however, positions poetry and the profession surrounding it among the many activities through which individuals attempt to make their daily lives cohere around some faint sense of purpose.
Whether writing about money, sexuality, religion, or poetry itself, Spicer returns to the tidy arrangements by which language organizes our most unruly ideas. He distrusts the easy adjectives, similes, and conclusions that allow us to move through the hours without confronting the inadequacy of our explanations. Language makes the world manageable, but it can also obscure the very things it claims to reveal. The poet's task, in Spicer's view, is not simply to manufacture elegant descriptions but to remain alert to the distance between the world and the words we use to describe it.
His poem “Thing Language” offers a particularly concise expression of this suspicion:
The ocean here resists the elaborate meanings poets would impose upon it. It is neither a convenient symbol nor a willing participant in the human search for significance. It simply exists, indifferent to the interpretive machinery brought to bear upon it. The poem’s repetitions and abrupt turns seem to mock the assumption that language can secure a final understanding of the world. Even as Spicer describes the ocean, he insists upon its refusal to be described adequately. The result is a paradox: poetry declares its own inadequacy while demonstrating how much can be communicated through that very admission.
There is a reserved antagonism running through Spicer’s work, a subtle and ironic derision of the language arts as he saw them practiced. He recognized how easily poetry could become entangled in matters of status, property, and the ownership of ideas, as writers mistook their own cleverness for genius and their reputations for evidence of genuine achievement. The external world, which we can never know except through descriptions that themselves require continual revision, remains something else altogether. Nature and reality have no need for the elaborate vocabularies with which poets compare them to everything else they encounter.
What does this prove? Perhaps, as Spicer suggests, that we know far less about the material we attempt to distill into verse than we would like to believe. Even our language is borrowed, divided among other speakers and other conversations. The poet does not possess words so much as receive and rearrange them, hoping to discover combinations that reveal something not previously available to consciousness.
This brings us to Spicer’s most distinctive conception of the poet as a radio. In his poetics, inspiration is less an expression of individual genius than a form of dictation. The poet becomes a living instrument capable of intercepting transmissions from an otherwise invisible world of sharper, bolder, more original combinations of sound, rhythm, and form. The artist is an antenna, not necessarily the originator of the message. The task is to receive it accurately, even when the transmission is obscure or unwelcome.
Spicer’s poem “The Sporting Life” develops this idea through a deliberately bruising analogy:
The metaphor of the radio becomes more complicated here. The poet is not simply a passive receiver of beautiful transmissions from beyond the self. He is also a damaged combatant, someone who has taken too many blows and accumulated too much scar tissue. Messages arrive with a physical and psychological cost. The poet may become unreliable, even a liar, as he attempts to account for what he has received. Yet he continues to counterpunch, responding to forces he cannot fully understand or control.
The poem also complicates the idea of divine inspiration. The messages may be powerful, but they are not necessarily aware of their own power. Their significance does not depend upon their recognition of it, any more than a champion needs to know who has been defeated by his blows. Spicer's radio is thus both a vehicle for inspiration and an emblem of the poet's vulnerability. The poet receives what he cannot claim to have created, and he must somehow transform it into language without pretending to possess its ultimate meaning.
Spicer was an unusual and often troubled figure: an alcoholic, a contrarian, and a man frequently at odds with the literary community in which he lived. Yet he was also a serious, sometimes brilliant poet whose work offered propositions rather than easy conclusions, whose questions were thornier and less comforting than the sweetened verse celebrated by literary fashion. His poems repeatedly challenge us to reconsider the relationship between language and experience, between the individual voice and the forces that speak through it.
In this respect, I would place him alongside Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, both of whom subjected the elaborate infrastructure of our descriptions to relentless scrutiny. Like Stevens, Spicer was interested in the ways imagination constructs a version of reality that can sustain us without ever entirely containing the world. Like Williams, he understood that the particularities of ordinary life could resist the abstractions through which poetry seeks to organize them. And in his lyric brilliance, his ear for conversational turns and sudden reversals, he can be compared with Frank O’Hara, a poet he famously disliked, and who seems to have returned the sentiment.
Spicer's distinctiveness lies in the way he makes the contradictions, competing desires, and unexpected conundrums of verbal experience comprehensible to the senses. His poems are often funny, abrasive, and resistant to the consolations of conventional lyricism. They reward close attention because they do not resolve their tensions prematurely. Instead, they allow a thought to develop until its own complications become the subject of the poem.
“Book of Music” provides a striking example of this method. Where many poems about love attempt to preserve its intensity by transforming it into an image of eternity, Spicer approaches the subject with a skepticism that gradually dismantles the romantic metaphor.
The opening image suggests the exhaustion that follows an immense emotional undertaking. The lovers resemble swimmers emerging from an ocean, their experience so encompassing that it becomes difficult to locate the point at which it ended. Yet Spicer immediately begins dismantling the comparison. Love is not an ocean whose waves blur the boundaries between beginning and end, nor is its conclusion necessarily a deathlike disappearance. It is, instead, like a length of coiled rope, whose twists cannot conceal the fact that it has two ends.
The shift is devastating in its simplicity. The circle of romantic fulfillment gives way to an object with a finite length, an object that may be knotted, twisted, and coiled but cannot escape its termination. The lovers may insist that they loved, and Spicer grants that some parts of them did. But the rest of them remain two separate people, each with an existence beyond the relationship. The final assertion, “Poetry ends like a rope,” extends the argument beyond love itself. Neither emotion nor art can claim exemption from the limits that govern ordinary things.
This is a cynic's view, perhaps, but not an entirely unfeeling one. Spicer understands the appeal of the original romantic image, the dizzying promise of a love that seems as boundless as the world itself. His refusal to preserve that illusion is not merely an exercise in disenchantment. It is a way of acknowledging the distance between what we feel and what we can honestly say about it. The twists and turns of experience do not necessarily restore what has been lost. Rapture gives way to memory, and memory may eventually soften into the skepticism of someone fortunate enough to witness his own foolish expectations about people, places, and things—including the earnest declarations he once made about poetry in classrooms, dorm rooms, and cafés where the intelligent and underpaid gathered for a cheap drink and some company.
The same skepticism that informs Spicer’s treatment of love animates his understanding of poetry. Both are human endeavors through which we attempt to impose coherence on experiences that resist it. Both invite us to believe in meanings that may prove temporary, and both leave us confronting the limits of our own descriptions. Yet Spicer's skepticism does not make his work nihilistic. On the contrary, it creates the conditions for a more alert and demanding engagement with language. If words cannot guarantee the truths we want them to express, they may still reveal unexpected connections, expose our evasions, and give shape to experiences that would otherwise remain inarticulate.
This is what makes Spicer's work so compelling, and why Silliman's September 11 collage seems to me more than a provocative juxtaposition. The collage demonstrates that a poem does not remain sealed within the circumstances of its composition. Once released into the world, it becomes available to histories and experiences that its author could neither anticipate nor control. The words may return to us through the radio of memory, carrying messages that seem newly urgent because the world has changed around them.
Spicer might have resisted such an interpretation. Indeed, his suspicion of poetic ownership and his insistence on the autonomy of language might have led him to object to the very idea that his work could be recruited to explain a historical catastrophe. But that possibility does not invalidate the collage. It underscores the paradox at the heart of his poetics: the poet transmits messages without owning them, and the words acquire meanings beyond the poet's authority.
No one wrote quite like Jack Spicer. His poetry remains a singular achievement because it exposes the instability of language while demonstrating its extraordinary capacity for resonance. Peter Gizzi, Kevin Killian, and Wesleyan University Press deserve our gratitude for restoring this major American voice to the shared canon. My Vocabulary Did This to Me makes clear that Spicer's work is not merely a set of arguments about poetry, nor a collection of historical curiosities from an eccentric literary outsider. It is a sustained inquiry into how words reach us, how they fail us, and how they sometimes become indispensable precisely when our own experience has left us speechless.
The poet is a radio, a liar, a counterpunching radio. The world sends its signals, often without explanation, and history supplies the circumstances in which we finally hear them. What matters is not whether the poet intended every subsequent meaning, but whether the words continue to make contact with the lives we are trying to understand. Spicer's poems do. They arrive from elsewhere, bearing the marks of their own contradictions, and remind us that language, like love, like history, and like the coiled rope, is always moving toward an end even as it opens onto meanings we cannot yet foresee.
